Three rapists face what critics call a cruel and useless punishment
The crime had been nightmarishly brutal: a six-hour gang rape in an Anderson, S.C., motel room by three men, after which the 80-lb. woman victim required four pints of blood and five days of hospitalization. The rapists had pleaded guilty in the hope that as first offenders, they would receive a lenient sentence from Judge C. Victor Pyle. "The defendants," intoned Pyle, "shall be confined to the custody of the South Carolina department of corrections for a period of 30 years." That was the maximum. The real jolt came when the judge added that he would suspend the sentence "upon the defendants' voluntary agreement to be castrated and the successful completion of that surgical procedure."
"It was like someone had hit me over the head with an iron pipe," said one defense attorney, Theo Mitchell. "The sentence shocked everyone in the courtroom—the clerk, the solicitor, the sheriff, even the victim." As for Defendants Roscoe James Brown, 27, Mark Vaughn, 21, and Michael Braxton, 19, "they really didn't understand the import at first," said Glenn W. Thomason, another defense lawyer. "They thought he meant sterilization. I explained that he meant cutting their testicles off. That put them in a state of shock, to put it mildly." Nevertheless, the three are so terrified of a long prison term that they are seriously considering the judge's proposed alternative even as their lawyers are appealing the sentences.
Many Anderson citizens were grimly pleased by the severity of the judge's either-or-decision. But few legal, medical and corrections experts endorse the castration alternative. As a punitive response, it evokes images of both Nazi Germany and pre-Civil War America, where male slaves were emasculated if they were even suspected of sexual intimacy with a white woman. (In the Anderson case, the rapists and their victim are black.) Says University of Chicago Law Professor Norval Morris: "It's in the same spirit as lopping off arms of shoplifters or tongues of libelists." Yale Kamisar, a professor of criminal law at the University of Michigan, argues that castration would obviously violate the Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. But he acknowledges that it may be no less cruel to be sent to prison, "where you can be gang-raped or God knows what else."
As far as the safety of the community is concerned, freeing a castrated rapist may also be unwise. "I know a lot of rape victims approve, but I'm afraid to have men like this out on the street," says Joy Bennett, executive director of the Rape Crisis Council of Greenville, S.C. A. Nicholas Groth, author of Men Who Rape and director of a program for sex offenders at a Connecticut prison, notes that "rape is the sexual expression of aggression, and not an aggressive expression of sexuality." Furthermore, Groth points out, even after castration, some men are capable of having intercourse. And if they cannot, the male hormone testosterone, produced naturally by the testes, is readily available in artificial form by pill or injection to restore both libido and potency.